The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain

Beyond the Secular City

Antonio Cordoba, Daniel García-Donoso, Antonio Cordoba, Daniel García-Donoso

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137600714
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137600202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

© The Author(s) 2016

Antonio Cordoba and Daniel García-Donoso (eds.)The Sacred and Modernity in Urban SpainHispanic Urban Studies10.1057/978-1-137-60020-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Toward an Aural Hygiene, 1856–1907

Samuel Llano¹

(1)

The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

End Abstract

This chapter explores the intersection between the notion of the sacred and the establishment of an “aural hygiene” in Madrid during the second half of the nineteenth century. By “aural hygiene,” I refer to the discourses and practices that the rising middle classes in that context used to control and regulate the urban soundscape. The importance of studying aural hygiene in nineteenth-century Madrid and other modern cities could be measured by the intensity of reactions elicited by attacks on what, with more or less consensus, were perceived to be the ruling principles of middle-class lifestyle. Aural hygiene must be understood in the context of other, more commonly acknowledged forms of hygiene that were aimed at fulfilling three functions: first, to produce and establish a culture of comfort that should serve as both a guarantor of social order and a marker of class identity; second, to appease the fears of contagion that emerged in the wake of a series of deadly cholera epidemics; and, third, to use the experience gained in addressing those fears to survey and control groups deemed to pose a threat to public morality and order, such as the poor, vagrants, and—most crucially for this study—street musicians (Cleminson and Fuentes Peris; Fuentes Peris 1–8). Being one of the defining forces of the urban soundscape, music has the capacity to transform the ways in which citizens perceive, experience, and engage with the city. For that reason, and depending on how it is used, music has the power to generate forms of collective identification that are encompassing enough to guarantee social order, or that, on the contrary, may contribute to social disorders—as the following pages will show.

Cultural anthropology, sociology, and urban studies have provided theoretical insights into the study of the sacred in different societies that are useful to explore the complexities and contradictions that characterized attempts to establish an aural hygiene in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Madrid. Those theoretical insights help to assess whether those attempts can be described as forms of consecrating the urban space or a portion thereof, since, in trying to impose order over chaos, they appealed to—and manipulated—competing and variably accepted notions of the sacred. In her seminal work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas has argued that one of the aspects that differentiates “us” from “primitive cultures” is that “for us sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite poles” (7). It is disputable whether that somewhat vague “us” is encompassing enough to incorporate nineteenth-century Madrid, overriding differences between cultures, times, and rural and urban environments. But this chapter will provide evidence that, in line with Douglas’s claims, attempts to modernize Madrid in that period were underpinned by hygienic discourses and buttressed by measures aimed at protecting certain areas of the city from the intrusion of “impure” and unwanted sounds and musical practices that were consequently tagged as “noise.” From that point of view, attempts to establish an aural hygiene in that context could well be regarded as the product of a sacralizing drive.

Yet, the belief that Madrid’s bourgeois quarters could be successfully colonized through sacralizing and hygienic practices and discourses overlooked the fact that the sacred is, in itself, fragmentary and contradictory. As Gordon Lynch has observed, by virtue of its multiplicity, “the sacred threatens to fragment society and provides potent symbolic material for social conflict” (114). He argues that the sacred is “always implicated with power in some sense” (118) and that it can be enlisted to create a “symbolic framework … to make widespread, collective violence possible” or even “legitimate” (116). The cleansing of Madrid’s soundscape that is explored in this chapter can certainly be considered from that perspective. But it is no less true—continuing with Lynch—that there is a “potential” in “sacred forms” to “become dangerous tools of political and cultural mobilization” (119). This applies particularly to practices that disrupted the establishment of an aural hygiene, such as the music of blind street musicians and organ grinders, or the loud cries of peddlers. Therefore, to identify the sacred univocally with hygienic discourses is misleading, even if part of the latter’s mission was to arrogate different forms of sacredness and tag certain lifestyles and behaviors as “filthy” (Fuentes Peris 27–33).

The complexities of the “sacred” gain visibility—and audibility—as they acquire a spatial dimension in the context of the city. This is shown in the planning of Madrid’s so-called Ensanche (expansion), designed by architect Carlos María de Castro and implemented from the 1860s on. This expansion was aimed at offering the middle classes a comfort niche and a sanitized space with improved surveillance and enhanced mobility so as to facilitate economic growth (Carballo, Pallol, and Vicente 24–95). Thanks to the Ensanche, Madrid’s middle classes appropriated and consecrated a seamless and homogeneous space where any crease or irregularity would be crushed under the regulatory weight of the grid layout. Yet, as Mircea Eliade has argued, “no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space” (22). Eliade understood the sacred as an antidote against the spatial relativity fostered by capitalism. This relativity turns the city into an accumulation of commodified interchangeable places, an “amorphous mass” around which man moves “governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society” (Eliade 23). Amid this spatial indeterminacy, the sacred wants to occupy a specific space and assert its identity. According to Roger Caillois, “the sacred powers inhabit a fixed locale [while] the empire of defilement, on the contrary, is diffused and indeterminate” (54). For both authors, capitalism’s commodifying power runs against the middle classes’ attempt to establish qualitative differences among the city’s various socially defined spaces.

However, defining sacred spaces in the city can run counter to the interests of the middle classes as it generates sentiments of alienation that lead to social disorders. Georg Simmel has indeed found alienation to be the characteristic feature of metropolitan life. The rapid succession of sensory experiences in the city—Simmel argues—reduces emotional engagement between citizens and excludes irrational and instinctive impulses, leading to “a mutual strangeness and repulsion which … can break out into hatred and conflict” (15). Mutual mistrust is aggravated by the fact that, in the city, alienation follows patterns of spatial segregation. Louis Wirth has characterized “urbanites” by a “blasé outlook” (12) and a predisposition for living close to “persons of homogeneous status and needs,” generating an urban landscape comparable to a “mosaic of social worlds in which the transition from one to the other is abrupt” (15). This context fosters a “toleration of differences” which in turn produces a “secularization of life” (15). In other words, because of citizens’ tendency to gather with their peers, the city generates a map of economically and culturally segregated social areas.

Yet, there are forces in society that conspire against this neatly segregated urban landscape. Some urban identities may be discrete, but there is some degree of interconnectedness between them. Michel de Certeau describes the city as a “texturology in which extremes coincide” (91), one that “provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (94). Walkers-by connect those properties through their movements, which de Certeau compares with “speech utterances” (100). Like “tropes” or “deviations,” those utterances challenge the “fiction” of a “proper meaning” attached to “the geometrical space of urbanists and architects,” and expose the fact that such meaning has no “current use” (100). In other words, the “everyday” runs against cartography’s power to fixate meanings in the city and challenges attempts to impose a panoptical and regulatory gaze. These walkers-by are for de Certeau “ordinary practitioners of the city,” and stand “below the thresholds at which visibility begins,” that is, in a position that escapes “the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye” (93).

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have similarly accounted for the effect of social forces that challenge segregation in an urban context, and more particularly for the presence of an attraction or “desire” for the Other that is the cause that the “boundaries between high and low, between aristocrat and rag-picker [are] simultaneously established and transgressed” (126). For all its emphasis on segregation, modernity has produced technology-powered sites of cultural miscegenation, such as the tram or the railway station, that are “shockingly promiscuous” (Stallybrass and White 135). This has prompted attempts to control the gaze by means of regulatory practices and discourses, as is manifest in Madrid’s aforementioned grid layout (McKinney 15–46). But the nineteenth-century city “continued to invade the privatized body and household of the bourgeoisie as smell,” since smell “had a pervasive and invisible presence difficult to regulate” (Stallybrass and White 139). The same could be said about noise.

The present chapter considers music, sound, and “noise” as forces that escape or challenge those regulatory practices and discourses. Noise, here, is understood as a contingent category that encompasses a range of musical practices deemed socially destabilizing or disruptive. Legal attempts to control street music and noise in Madrid gained full official sanction with the city code of 1892 which prescribed that “after midnight it is forbidden to produce in the streets noise of any kind that may bother the neighborhood, to gather in gangs and to offer music or serenades without permission from the competing Authority”; “It is also forbidden to celebrate dances in the street” (Belmás 13). Well before that, however, complaints started to arise in the 1860s, targeting organ grinders with an abusive and hyperbolic language. To put one of many examples, an article called them “homicidal musicians” and claimed that “there is no comparable torment” to the “noise” that they produce (“Música callejera”). By sneaking into the bourgeois household, the music or “noise” of organilleros (organ grinders) not only ran counter to all attempts to create a comfort niche but also threatened to obliterate the clear-cut division between the public and private spaces that the middle classes tried to establish by confining women to the domestic space and defining the streets as a sanitized, commodified space of economic activity (Aldaraca 55–87). In addition, the music played at drinking establishments, such as taverns or the proliferating cafés cantante (flamenco cafés), sparked a widespread reaction against flamenco music, which, having been present in Madrid’s salons and private circles for centuries, made it to the public sphere with the arrival, in Madrid, of waves of Andalusian immigrants from the 1840s on (Blas Vega 8086). Gradually, intellectuals and journalists used the term “flamenquismo” to encompass bullfighting plus any form of crime or sexual “deviance” that was deemed to cause the moral degeneration in Spanish society.

The San Bernardino Band

In this scenario, the San Bernardino band was summoned to restore social cohesion—if there ever was one—and regenerate Madrid, which many intellectuals regarded as Spain’s most degraded urban nucleus (Noel 10). Perhaps no other phenomenon illustrates better the interlocking between the sacred and an aural hygiene, plus the contradictions that plagued it, than the participation of the San Bernardino workhouse band in public life since its creation in 1856. The band helped to spread an aural hygiene by silencing and displacing other musical practices deemed inappropriate, indecorous, or unhygienic. Madrid’s soundscape was thus a competing space where different musical practices and sound experiences vied with each other, and where those who struggled for survival strove to make themselves heard. The times and places where those practices unfolded and, most importantly, the lifestyles associated with them determined how they were perceived by those capable of making decisions about them or influencing public opinion. The question of loudness, although important, was therefore secondary in defining certain musics as “noise.” Its contingency lies in the fact that, as with “dirt,” “noise” is a “residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications” as we “make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels” in the process of dealing with chaos (Douglas 37).

The San Bernardino band drew most of its sacralizing potential from the foundations on which the workhouse was established in 1834. An edict declared that the workhouse aimed to confine the poor, “who are detrimental to civilization and public morality, infest our streets, and drag their miserable existence at the expense of a misunderstood sense of charity” (Agulló 28). The workhouse’s mission was to observe and preserve public morality, and was an improvised remedy to the high death tolls of the rising cholera epidemics that plagued Madrid since the eighteenth century, given that the poor were seen as a source of contamination (Vidal Galache 305–06). But San Bernardino must also be regarded in the broader context of a long European process of institutionalization of the practice of confinement that started in seventeenth-century France and was introduced in Spain under King Charles III (1759–1788). In Spain, confinement was the keystone of the rationalization of social aid whereby the state tried to curb the power of the Catholic Church in the administration of charity. In opposition to the Church’s promotion of “unthinking” almsgiving as a way to save the soul, the state aimed to rationalize the administration of social aid in order to manage the limited available resources, on the one hand, and to combat idleness and foster productivity, on the other. It, therefore, based the administration of social aid on the work ethic, which was predicated on the distinction between the “deserving” poor—that is, the disabled or those unable to work—and their “undeserving” counterparts (Shubert 40–46; Callahan 3–5). In practice, this distinction was overlooked and the raided poor were indiscriminately lumped together and forced into San Bernardino and its sibling institutions until, by 1889, all workhouses in Madrid became full to capacity and stopped admitting new inmates (Ayuntamiento “8-32-12”). ¹

Thanks to its identification with values of control and order, the San Bernardino band was likely to embody notions of the sacred as a set of secular technologies of disciplining whereby Madrid’s middle classes sought to cast and impose a panoptical gaze across the city—as discussed above. The most immediate beneficiaries—or victims—of the San Bernardino band’s sacralizing and coercive power were the workhouse inmates. Music was instrumental in establishing a regime of discipline and order, and in structuring and regulating work, coordinated motion and, more generally, the pace of life in San Bernardino. Inmates, who were mostly children plus some adults, were subjected to a hard moral and labor discipline, having to work long hours in the in-house workshops where useful goods were produced. Workshops crudely embodied confinement’s central tenet that all members of society should be productive (Driver 3, 65). It is significant that the longest chapter by far of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Toward an Aural Hygiene, 1856–1907
• 2. Sacred, Sublime, and Supernatural: Religion and the Spanish Capital in Nineteenth-Century Fantastic Narratives
• 3. The Modern Usurer Consecrates the City: Circulation and Displacements in the Torquemada Series
• 4. Spirituality and Publicity in Barcelona, 1929: Performing Citizenship between Tradition and Avant-Garde
• 5. The Places of the Subject: Abjection and the Transcendent City in Nada and La plaça del Diamant
• 6. Living Off the Exception: Biopolitical Modernity and Sacratio in Francoist Spain
• 7. Urban Avatars of “El Maligno”: Sacredness in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Caníbal
• 8. Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes’s Crematorio
• 9. A New Heaven for a New Earth: Religion in the Contemporary Spanish Novel
• 10. Media Landscapes of a Well-Dressed Multitude: The City and the Individual in Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras
• Backmatter